308 WHEELER— ANT LARV.^. 



rounded, dark-colored pellet, which puzzled me at first. In sections, 

 however, it was at once seen to consist of the triturated and com- 

 pacted bodies and parts of small insects. It is, in fact, a food-pellet 

 placed by the worker ants in the pocket just behind the larva's 

 mouth. In this stage, therefore, the larva is fed on solid food and 

 the strongly chitinized, acute and bidentate mandibles corroborate 

 this statement. Slender salivary glands may also be detected, indi- 

 cating that the substance of the food-pellet is subjected to extrain- 

 testinal digestion. The longer hairs on the dorsal integument have 

 almost completely disappeared. The first pair of appendages on the 

 prothorax has disappeared and the second pair is obsolescent. 



In the fourth, or adult stage (Fig. 8C) the larva is more elongate 

 and cylindrical and much more hypocephalic, the prothorax forming 

 a great protuberance in front of the head. The exudatoria are still 

 recognizable, with the exception of the first and second prothoracic 

 pairs, which have disappeared entirely. The labial appendages 

 are reduced. A food pellet was found in the postcephalic pocket 

 in several of the larvje of this stage but is not represented in the 

 figure. The coarse hairs have disappeared from the integument, 

 which is now uniformly covered with very short, delicate hairs, and 

 the structure of the posterior end of the body is very different from 

 that of the preceding: stages. 



We owe the only account of the ccthiops larva in the literature to 

 Emery (1912). He describes what corresponds to my fourth stage 

 larva very briefly and figures its anterior end with some of the 

 exudatoria, but erroneously interprets the large prothoracic pair as 

 " ebauches de pattes," or rudiments of the anterior pair of imaginal 

 legs.* 



The larvce of Pacliysiina latifroiis are quite as extraordinary 

 as those of ccthiops and also pass through four stages. The tro- 

 phidium, or first stage, shown in Fig. 9, is very hypocephalic, the pro- 



* In the same paper Emery created the suljgenus Pachysiiiia for the ac- 

 commodation of what was formerly called Sima ccthiops and for a new 

 species described as latifroiis, because they have the frontal carinse of the 

 worker and female much more widely separated than in the numerous species 

 of Tetraponera (Sima auctorum) . I have raised Pachysima to generic rank, 

 because the larvae of the two species are so very different from those of 

 Tetraponera. 



